Palace of Lies

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Because . . . because he’s someone who looks at me the way Harper always looked at Cecilia? I thought.  And . . . because I wish I could let myself look back at him the same way?

  This was not the right time for revelations of the heart. Not when the entire ballroom was staring at me.

  I gripped the quill a little harder, and looked out at the cluster of doubly fake princesses. I thought the sight of them would steady me, would remind me that I had already managed to make sure thirteen girls would get away safely.

  But I got a jolt: There weren’t just twelve doubly fake princesses standing in that corner of the room. There were also about a dozen other girls, all wearing various servants’ costumes.

  The impostor princesses that I had been so proud of saving were back. Back in the ballroom—and back in danger.

  45

  What is wrong with them? I wondered. Didn’t they believe me after all? Did even those girls lie to me? Were they setting me up for betrayal all along?

  But then I saw Catrice, the blond girl who had seemed to be the leader of the others down in the dungeon, mouth the words, We thought you might need our help.

  There was a reason they hadn’t let me save them: Because they thought I might need them to save me.

  I glanced at the faces of the other girls behind Catrice. Some of them looked just as eager as Catrice; some, I suspected, had come back because they still kind of wondered if maybe there would be an opportunity to marry a prince. That didn’t make them insubordinate or evil. That just meant that, like Prince Charming, they had started thinking for themselves.

  But it ruins the one thing I was sure I was going to be able to accomplish tonight, I thought.

  There was still the peace treaty, but now I doubted even this. To hide my uncertainty, I began to read the parchment in front of me, starting at the top: Be it known throughout the world that the kingdoms of Fridesia and Suala shall cease their long-standing war once and for all as of ____________________.

  I filled in the date and read on. The next section was flowery language describing the glories of both kingdoms, and how decades of enmity should not be allowed to continue to have a detrimental effect on or inhibit the progress of either kingdom.

  I was only skimming now. Then I tripped over a phrase: This barrier of land between the two kingdoms shall be subdivided into equal thirds and governed by rulers to be known henceforth as King Eldridge, Queen Estrelline, and King Lochlin.

  I blinked. Was it possible that my enemies’ schemes were even more diabolical than I’d suspected? I backed up and reread the previous paragraph, which was as dense as a thicket and even easier to get lost in. As far as I could tell, it seemed to refer to a huge strip of land, perhaps more than of a third of each of the two kingdoms. And that land was to be set aside to keep the warring kingdoms of Fridesia and Suala safely apart.

  And who’s supposed to be governing that land? I wondered. Kings Eldridge and Lochlin, and Queen Estrelline?

  It struck me that I had once heard that Lord Throckmorton’s given name was Eldridge.

  So could I stake my life on the likelihood that Madame Bisset’s given name is Estelline, and Lord Twelling’s is Lochlin?

  Was it a matter of needing to stake my life on that? My life and Prince Charming’s and the fake princesses’ and the doubly fake princesses’ and—how many other people’s?

  “We can’t sign this,” I whispered to Prince Charming.

  I pointed to the offending phrase in the document.

  He looked at me blankly—blankly and dully and as though, even though he was trying, he still couldn’t care about anything beyond the deaths of his wife and child. He was trying not to be stupid and to do his own thinking, but right now he needed a little help.

  I remembered that an entire ballroom full of people was watching me. Enemies and friends—and a vast swath of people who might take either side.

  Sometimes you just can’t worry about what anyone else is going to think or how anyone else is going to react, I told myself. Sometimes you just have to do what you know is right.

  I snapped the quill pen in half.

  “We can’t sign this,” I said aloud, the words ringing throughout the ballroom, filling up every crevice. My voice was not well modulated; it did not sound palace bred or cultured or pretty. But it was strong and sure and authoritative. And that was exactly how I needed to speak. “This is not the peace treaty we Sualan princesses negotiated with the Fridesian ambassador. The war is over, but this is not the document to seal the peace. Bring us the proper document and then we will sign!”

  For a moment it seemed that everyone was too stunned by my words to do anything. But then everything happened fast.

  Lord Twelling turned and began trying to shove his way back through the crowd, toward the door. Prince Charming recovered enough to scream, “Guards! Stop Lochlin Twelling!”

  Guards appeared out of nowhere and grabbed Lord Twelling by the arms.

  “Guards! Get Lord Throckmorton and Madame Bisset, too,” I screamed, because I could see them also trying to slip out the back.

  And even though I was Sualan and my kingdom had been at war with Fridesians almost my entire life, the Fridesian guards obeyed me, too.

  Meanwhile, one of the doubly fake princesses I hadn’t noticed missing before came bursting out of the secret door in the wall—wasn’t that Ella’s friend Mary? The one who had claimed she was too ugly to be a princess?

  Mary was screaming, “Wait! Wait! I found them! All by myself! Before the guards did!”

  And then Ella and Jed stepped out of the secret passageways too.

  “Don’t sign anything yet!” Jed was screaming. “I’ve got the proper treaty right here!”

  Ella was just beaming at me.

  “Sorry, I’m so sorry I left the ballroom,” Mary apologized as she came tripping toward me. “I think I’m better at watching out for Ella than at acting like a princess. When I heard the prince tell the guards she and Jed were missing—I had to go find them. Good thing I remembered all the prisons and extra dungeons Madame Bisset and Lord Twelling like to hide people in, from the last time Ella messed up one of their plans.”

  “You both saved us,” Ella cried, throwing her arms around Mary and me.

  “So you were in some secret other dungeon?” I asked. “And the prince didn’t know?”

  “Right,” Ella whispered, hugging Mary and me even tighter.

  I tried to figure out how the secret dungeon in the Fridesian palace corresponded to the dungeon system back at the Palace of Mirrors, but quickly gave up. It really didn’t matter now that Ella and Jed were free.

  I hugged Ella and Mary back, then turned to see if Prince Charming was ready to sign the new treaty—the right one.

  The prince had just finished hugging Jed, and now he was staring toward men at the back of the ballroom.

  “No!” he screamed. “You do not set my palace on fire! Guards! Stop them!”

  And then everyone in the ballroom swarmed toward the men who were taking torches down from the sconces. Maybe they would have succeeded in reaching the torches up toward the many frills and bows, but even Lord Twelling was yelling at the men, even with his own arms clutched by guards, “No! No! This is not the time for the flames! You were supposed to wait until after that treaty was signed and after it was safely out of the palace and after the poison toast was drunk . . .”

  How many people did our enemies plan to kill? I wondered in horror.

  Prince Charming and I yelled together, “Guards! Arrest the men with torches too!”

  Just then Tog and Herk and Janelia came rushing out of the secret door, panting and brushing cobwebs from their clothes.

  “Desmia! We’re here! We’ll save you!” Tog cried.

  “That’s not necessary this time around,” I said. “But I appreciate the thought.”

  For a moment I forgot the other hubbub in the ballroom, and just looked into Tog’s eyes. It was so strange to remember th
e times I’d thought of him as just a beggar boy. The times I’d had to remind myself that he and Herk were so different from me. They weren’t. He wasn’t. It was true that he wasn’t royalty. But he wasn’t a beggar, either.

  He was just my friend.

  Er—was I still lying to myself? Wasn’t he actually more than that?

  “You could do something else for me instead,” I said.

  “Um, sure,” Tog said. “What—?”

  To answer, I leaned in and kissed him.

  And he started to kiss me back, but we were interrupted by screaming over by the doors: “Desmia, Desmia—is Desmia here?”

  It was Cecilia, with Harper on her heels.

  I raced toward my friend and sister-princess, crying, “I’m here! I’m here! You made it too!”

  Behind me, I could hear Lord Twelling ranting at the guards who held his arms.

  “But I told the entire royal guard to keep out anyone else who claimed to be a Sualan princess,” he cried. “You were supposed to take them directly to the dungeons!”

  “You aren’t in charge anymore,” the guards growled back, practically in unison. “You’re the one going to the dungeon!”

  I grinned at Cecilia. We could hardly stop hugging each other. But I was the first to pull back.

  “The other girls,” I murmured. “Did you and Harper come straight here after the fire? Or did you find out what happened to any of the others first?”

  “We stopped to see Sir Stephen and Nanny Gratine, to tell them to find out for us, and to help the other girls if they could,” Cecilia said. “But we knew we had to get to Fridesia to meet you. And to make sure nothing messed up the treaty signing. Or Ella and Jed’s wedding.”

  “Nothing could mess up that,” Ella said behind us. “We would have exchanged vows in the dungeon, if we’d had to.” Then her face became more serious. “But—I’d like to know what happened to the other princesses. Surely they must have survived the fire too. . . .”

  I wondered how much Mary had told her. Or—how much of an optimistic spin she’d put on the tale.

  Just then Madame Bisset stopped in front of us as the guards led her out. I was stunned to see that the woman’s silver hair was sticking up and a button had come off her prim gray dress.

  “ ‘Surely they must have survived the fire, too,’ ” she mockingly mimicked Ella. “Only because Lord Throckmorton and I had our men save them from the flames. Not that they were worth the bother. Such idiots. Such shortsighted, defiant idiots.”

  Was she calling the sister-princesses idiots? Was that proof that they had survived?

  I put out my hand to keep the guards from pulling Madame Bisset away.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  Madame Bisset narrowed her eyes at me.

  “We smuggled twelve girls out of the fire—all but Cecilia,” she said. “We never found her. And you ran away. But we made all eleven of the other girls an offer. Well . . . we did it in declining order of desirability. We offered everyone the opportunity to come here for the chance to marry Prince Charming. We thought we’d set it up with one true princess and all the rest actresses. And of course he’d choose the true princess. But every single princess refused to help us. Everyone said it would hurt her kingdom—and her sister-princesses.”

  Not a single one of them was a viper, I thought. I should have trusted them fully, all along.

  Madame Bisset peered disdainfully at Cecilia and me.

  “At least the other girls were ladylike enough not to escape through cobwebs and roam the countryside with a young man, totally unchaperoned,” she said. “Or to jump out a second-story window before I even had the chance to explain our offer.”

  Cecilia looked at me in amazement.

  “You jumped out a second-story window?” she asked.

  “I had to,” I said.

  “But you were the princess we were most worried about,” Harper said. “Because everyone else had a knight and a nanny to look for them and take care of them. And you had . . . only us. And we couldn’t get back into the ballroom because the secret door locked behind us. We couldn’t think of any other way to help you except by coming to Fridesia.”

  I cast a glance over my shoulder, at Tog and Herk and Janelia.

  “Oh, it turns out I had people of my own too,” I said. “And a thirteenth sister.”

  Janelia beamed at me.

  Cecilia looked around, as if noticing for the first time that the ballroom was in utter disarray.

  “So,” Cecilia said. “Do you think the other girls came here too? Are we just . . . not seeing them in all the confusion?”

  It wasn’t such a crazy question, given that there were thirteen fake princesses and a dozen servants dressed as impostor princesses milling about.

  Madame Bisset turned back to us, jerking away from the guards trying to lead her away.

  “You want to know where your sister-princesses are now?” she asked, smiling maliciously. Even with the mussed hair and the missing button, she seemed to have regained some of her usual dignity. Or usual cruelty, anyway. “You want to know if they’re dead or alive? You could go to your graves wondering that. Because I’ll never tell.”

  Epilogue

  The first strains of the wedding march sounded from the pianoforte at the back of the chapel. A flow of harp music quickly joined in, providing an unusual harmony.

  It was Tuesday morning, the time that had been set aside for the official signing of the peace treaty between Suala and Fridesia. Prince Charming, Queen Gertrude, King Charming, Cecilia, and I had already done that late Friday night—or, actually, an hour or two into Saturday morning—after things had settled down a little and we’d all agreed that, to prevent further scheming, we should make the real treaty official.

  After a lifetime of war and countless lives lost, we finally had peace. Real peace.

  But Tuesday was still set aside as holiday celebration day for both kingdoms, and so Jed and Ella had decided to use the day for a different happy purpose: as their wedding day.

  “Mrs. Smeal will never speak to us now,” Ella had moaned in the palace ballroom in the early hours of Saturday morning, as they planned everything. “Letting her think we canceled our wedding and then having it anyway on a different day . . .”

  “We can have a second ceremony out at the refugee camp for her and any refugees who are left,” Jed suggested. “I just . . . don’t want to delay any longer. And the faster we get married, the faster we can help the Sualans find their other princesses.”

  They were still missing. It appeared that Madame Bisset was the only one who’d ever known where all of them were taken, and she still wasn’t talking.

  Now I sat in a pew with Cecilia, Janelia, Tog, and Herk, with a space left for Harper as soon as he finished his part of the wedding music. The sped-up wedding plans meant that there’d been little time to think of clothing. Catrice and the other fake-princess actresses had offered us their ball gowns from their one night of pretending to be Sualan royalty, but Cecilia, Janelia, and I had turned them down—after all, they were all invited to the wedding too, and that would have left them with nothing to wear. They were all officially out of work now, and far from their acting troupes. And Lord Throckmorton, Lord Twelling, and Madame Bisset had of course never paid them for their convincing performances. So we couldn’t disadvantage them further.

  I’d feared that that would leave Janelia, Herk, Tog, and me wearing the peasant garb Mrs. Smeal had given us at the refugee camp, and Harper and Cecilia wearing the slightly ash-stained suit and ball gown they’d brought from that last tragic night at the Palace of Mirrors. But then Prince Charming offered the boys outgrown clothing from when he was their ages. And, in the spirit of the new peace treaty, he offered Janelia, Cecilia, and me clothes that had been delivered for Princess Corimunde, which she’d never had a chance to use.

  Princess Corimunde had been quite a large woman. And though Ella’s friend Mary had proved quite
skillful at sizing the dresses down, nothing could be done about the fact that the former princess had also gone in for rather bizarre fabric designs: Cecilia’s dress was covered in a pattern of life-size green cabbages—or maybe those were supposed to be giant, oddly colored roses? Janelia’s dress seemed to have a repeating pattern of giant scissors and mine, a similarly garish pattern of huge orange spinning wheels.

  It was a good thing we weren’t still in the Palace of Mirrors, or I might have had to fight giggles all through the wedding ceremony, seeing those crazy designs reflected again and again.

  The strange thing was, Tog was staring at me as though I were wearing the most beautiful dress in the world.

  He really did seem to be wearing the most handsome suit in the world. He could easily be mistaken for royalty now. And yet, staring at him, I could understood why he’d said I’d looked most royal back in the cave, when I was heaving the pot of boiled rags at the men who were about to strangle him.

  As handsome as he looked now, I still thought he’d looked even better in that same cave, when he and Janelia ran back to save me.

  Cecilia dug her elbow into my side.

  “Hey, I know you’re all googly-eyed with the newness of this love thing, but you really should be watching the bride and groom, not your own beloved,” she whispered.

  Googly-eyed? Love thing? Beloved? I wondered.

  I realized I’d totally missed Ella walking down the aisle.

  “Oh . . . right,” I murmured.

  I glanced back once more at Tog and noticed that Herk was digging his elbow into Tog’s side and maybe saying the exact same thing. Tog glanced my way once more, guiltily, and then turned to face the front of the chapel.

  I reached out and firmly grasped his hand anyway, because at least I could have that at Ella and Jed’s wedding. How could I not want to hold Tog’s hand as we listened to other people speak of love?

  “Do you, Jed, take Ella . . . ,” the chaplain was saying.